Archive for October, 2010

In this link, Nick Cernis writes in detail about what you should do to protect yourself on public wi-fi networks. Please take a moment to read it — it’s very clearly written for non-tech readers, and be sure to enjoy his thoroughly amusing analogy with cookie monsters.

He also goes into why you need to do it in the first place, but if you haven’t seen FireSheep, go take a look at how hilariously easy this Firefox extension renders the process of other people capturing your private logins when you’re using public unsecured wi-fi (e.g. [email protected]).

Cernis recommends you secure your connection with a VPN. He recommends StrongVPN, which I subscribe to — it seems perfectly reasonable at US$55 a year (and also lets me access Hulu and other “must be in the US” sites). If you’re now a paranoid wreck and are thinking of signing up, drop me a note and I can send you a referral so I can PROFIT IMMENSELY FROM SOCIAL MEDIA AND BLOGGERY OMG SEO $$$$. (Actually, it’s just $15.)

So, there’s a new MacBook Air. This comic, which Fake Steve found in a Gizmodo comment string, sums up what I think about it:

Don’t get me wrong; I want one, I really do. However, every “hard” spec on it is worse than those on my 3.5-year old MacBook Pro — slower processor, less RAM, less hard drive space, graphics with shared memory.

The “invisible” specs are much better, though — lighter, thinner, longer battery life, higher pixel density, and much faster hard drive. There’s nothing I can do about the first four, but I might just get a solid-state drive to speed up my aging MBP. It’ll be expensive, but from all accounts it’ll be worth it, and it’ll hopefully tide me over until the next generation of MacBook Pros with flash drives show up.